Disintegration - The Splintering Of Black America Part 2

Right now, the immigrant community is best described as Emergent. In ten years, more expansive language may be required.

In 1939, a tract of land in Was.h.i.+ngton's northeast quadrant, near the Anacostia River, was transformed into the Langston Golf Course. It is the scruffiest of the city's three public courses, the toughest to play, and in many ways it's my favorite because of its history: Langston was established as a segregated facility. It was where black golfers, and only black golfers, were allowed to play. On any given Sat.u.r.day, in the years before integration, out on the course you would have found doctors and lawyers, black celebrities who happened to be in town, and a few guys with swings so sweet that they might have been able to make a living on the professional tour, if blacks had been allowed. Lee Elder, one of the first African Americans who did get to play on the pro tour, managed the Langston course for a time after he retired from compet.i.tion.

Things are different now. As I write this paragraph, I'm also watching a golf tournament on television. I ought to turn it off but I won't, and the reason is simple: Tiger Woods is moving up the leaderboard. On the last hole, he made an impossible birdie putt from the fringe. Now, from a hundred yards, he's just hit a wedge to within inches of the pin. It looks as if a Transcendent moment may be coming, and I don't want to miss it.

Woods is part of the last of the four black Americas-the Transcendent elite that has climbed to the absolute pinnacle of American society. There have always been African Americans who had power, influence, or wealth, but they were a comparative elite, rich and powerful within the context of black American society. The new Transcendent black elite is rich and powerful within any context, by any conceivable standard. Forty years ago, which would have seemed more likely: that a black man would be elected president of the United States, or that a black man would become absolute lord and master of golf-golf!-a pastime redolent of wealth, influence, and long afternoons at the whites-only country club.

For that matter, what were the odds that a black woman, born into poverty in rural Mississippi, would become a billionaire who wields immense power, not just in television but in book and magazine publis.h.i.+ng, theater, philanthropy, and apparently whatever new world she decides to conquer? That a black man from Philadelphia who began his entertainment career as a rapper would become the biggest movie star in Hollywood? That a black woman from Birmingham, a childhood friend of one of the four girls killed in the 1963 terrorist bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, would chart the nation's foreign policy as secretary of state?

The temptation is to just keep running down the Transcendent roster-Venus and Serena Williams, Queen Latifah, Chris Rock-but you get the point. The nation is long accustomed to African American preeminence in entertainment and sports. But now there's also the billionaire Robert L. Johnson, who founded Black Entertainment Television. There's also the growing number of performer-tyc.o.o.ns, such as Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter, who have expanded beyond the music business to create their own mini-conglomerates-fas.h.i.+on, fragrances, television, whatever-and now take the stage only as a means of burnis.h.i.+ng the brand.

How it happened that a small but growing group of African Americans reached the top is no mystery. All it took was opportunity-created by the civil rights revolution-and time. Forty years ago, remember, only 2 percent of African Americans had incomes of $100,000 or more.13 Now more than 10 percent earn at least that much-and a small but growing number of black Americans earn many times more. Now more than 10 percent earn at least that much-and a small but growing number of black Americans earn many times more.

The Transcendents have impact far beyond their numbers. Someday America will get used to seeing African Americans in positions of supreme authority, wealth, or influence-exhibiting all the patterns of behavior that such status implies. When that day comes, Skip Gates won't have to worry about being arrested in his own home for being insufficiently deferential to a white cop. We're not quite there yet.

It took forty years. At times the process was gradual, at times abrupt, at times even violent. In the end, one black America became four-Mainstream, Abandoned, Transcendent, and Emergent. And the way to understand the African American condition today is first to examine all four.

4

THE MAINSTREAM: A DOUBLE LIFE.

We live in two worlds. That may be the most overused cliche about the black Mainstream, but it's also a central reality for most African Americans of my generation-working in integrated settings where we are often unsure of where we stand, socializing in black settings where solidarity flows from shared history and experience. A close second, cliche-wise, would be to point out that Sunday morning is the most segregated time of the week in America, when blacks and whites attend their separate churches.

But these statements of the obvious help make a more subtle point: A great deal of Mainstream black life is lived exclusively, or almost exclusively, among black people. Some would call this self-segregation. The pull of racial affinity remains strong among baby boomers, but our children, the millennials, don't feel it the way we do. In the long term, that's good for the nation; for now, it leads to friction within families and a generational divide.

Begin with the basic question of where to live. Mine was the first cohort of Mainstream black Americans who reached adulthood with the legal right and the financial resources to settle anywhere we wanted. Since we had been born into a world when African Americans had fewer options, our choices were partly pragmatic and partly political. Some, like our family, decided to integrate what had been all-white or mostly white neighborhoods. Many others decided to make a different statement.

In the Was.h.i.+ngton area, where I have watched this process unfold over the past three decades, more African Americans now live in the suburbs than in the District of Columbia itself. While there is a significant black presence in all the surrounding counties, the size of that presence varies greatly. The Potomac River is a powerful dividing line-far more African Americans live to the east and north of the river, in the Maryland suburbs, than in the Virginia suburbs to the west and south.

There are plenty of reasons why this overall pattern might arise. When the Mainstream exodus began, neighborhoods in the western part of the city were mostly white and those in the eastern part mostly black; the Maryland suburbs were closer and more familiar for African Americans who were ready to move. And while both states are south of the Mason-Dixon Line, Virginia means "Dixie" in a way that Maryland doesn't. Still, proximity and "Dixieness" don't explain why the Potomac is such a sociological barrier. We're talking about a compact metropolitan area where distance shouldn't be much of a factor one way or the other; rush-hour traffic is equally h.e.l.lacious no matter what starting point you choose on the circ.u.mferential Beltway. The close-in Virginia suburbs are politically liberal, and while there was a time when they wouldn't have accepted large numbers of black newcomers, that hasn't been an issue at least since I moved to the area, which was three decades ago. Back then, jurisdictions like Arlington or Alexandria in Virginia were smart, tolerant, progressive bastions compared to Maryland's Prince George's County, which was mostly white and semirural, full of good old boys who drove pickup trucks and women who sported some of the last non-ironic beehives in America.

Yet today, Arlington has a black population of less than 10 percent. Prince George's, where two-thirds of the residents are African American, is the most affluent black-majority county in the nation, with a median household income of about $68,000 a year.

The second-richest is DeKalb County, just east of Atlanta, with a median household income of about $52,000. In both cases, these averages are a distortion in the same way that the median household income figure for Manhattan-$63,704, as of 2007-doesn't tell you about the heiresses and trophy wives who spend that much on clothes and personal grooming every month. Prince George's and DeKalb aren't Manhattan, but in parts of both counties six-figure incomes are the norm.

In Prince George's, an unincorporated town called Mitch.e.l.lville is the place to begin any examination of the upwardly mobile black Mainstream. Nearly 80 percent of Mitch.e.l.lville's 10,000 residents are African American. The mean household income in 2007 was $104,786-compared to $68,080 for the state of Maryland as a whole-and the average home cost a bit more than $500,000.1 Many of the houses are "Mitch.e.l.lville Mansions"-cavernous, newly built structures with soaring entryways, multicar garages, and a design sensibility that could be called random historical nouveau: here a Palladian window, there a set of Doric columns, everywhere a joyous mash-up of architectural time and s.p.a.ce. A dwelling of six thousand square feet would be considered fairly modest. Many of the houses are "Mitch.e.l.lville Mansions"-cavernous, newly built structures with soaring entryways, multicar garages, and a design sensibility that could be called random historical nouveau: here a Palladian window, there a set of Doric columns, everywhere a joyous mash-up of architectural time and s.p.a.ce. A dwelling of six thousand square feet would be considered fairly modest.

Mitch.e.l.lville's unofficial boundaries encompa.s.s Woodmore, a gated community built around a country club and golf course. Just to the south is Lake Arbor, another exclusive community surrounding a golf course. Not far away is a golf course called Lake Presidential. The University of Maryland's main campus is in Prince George's, and the school's golf course is open to the public. More than a dozen other public and private courses make Prince George's County an epicenter of African American golf. On any reasonably clement spring, summer, or fall afternoon, you could tee off anywhere in the county and it would be perfectly normal to see an all-black foursome ahead of you and another one behind. They might be lawyers, doctors, government contractors, retired military; they might be ambitious professional women trying to learn the secret winks and nods of the executive suites. They might be beginners, but they also might be extremely good. Quiet as it was kept, African Americans were playing golf long before Tiger Woods was born.

The critical ma.s.s of black achievement and prosperity in Prince George's didn't just happen. The county was a logical destination for middle-cla.s.s black families who were ready to abandon the city-it was the least-developed close-in county with the most-affordable land. But there was no compelling reason for those Mainstream families to clump together other than preference. Many later arrivals settled in Prince George's not because that was where they could buy the biggest and best house for the least money but because they wanted to partic.i.p.ate in the project of creating a black community like none other in the nation.

To be part of this upper-Mainstream enclave, they were willing to make compromises and sacrifices. The Prince George's schools are better than those in the District of Columbia (which isn't saying much) but not nearly as highly regarded as those in other Was.h.i.+ngton suburbs. Parts of the county, particularly those near the D.C. line, are suffering "spillover dysfunction" as gentrification pushes poor people out of the city proper; towns like Capitol Heights are plagued by drug dealing and crime. County government has seen an embarra.s.sing series of corruption scandals, and the county police force has a reputation for shooting first and asking questions later, if at all. Top-of-the-line retailers like Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Neiman Marcus have bypa.s.sed the county in favor of other Was.h.i.+ngton-area jurisdictions with similar income figures, as have celebrity-chef restaurants and other luxury-cla.s.s amenities. Prince George's residents often complain of being overlooked and undervalued, and they often suspect that these slights are not a matter of economics but of race.

And that is one important regard in which the Mainstream black experience differs from that of other middle-cla.s.s Americans: Despite all the progress that's been made, there's still a nagging sense of being looked down upon, of being judged, of being disrespected. What keeps this difference alive is that these suspicions aren't always paranoia. They're not always justified, either, but there's enough reality behind them to keep alive a sense of separate but not-quite equal-enough to make many people seek safety, acceptance, and solidarity in numbers.

Prince George's is home to distinguished black scholars, professionals, athletes, and other pillars of respectable society. It is also home to the best-selling author who writes under the pseudonym Zane. This is not to suggest that there is anything untoward or dishonorable about Zane's success-she's one of the most prolific and popular African American writers working today-but simply to note that it's not the kind of achievement often celebrated in church or the cla.s.sroom. Her niche is steamy, explicit, erotic fiction aimed at black female readers, and books such as Addicted, The s.e.x Chronicles: Shattering the Myth Addicted, The s.e.x Chronicles: Shattering the Myth, and The s.e.x Chronicles 2: Gettin' Buck Wild The s.e.x Chronicles 2: Gettin' Buck Wild have made her a star in the publis.h.i.+ng world. Think of her work as romance fiction in which the characters are black, anatomically correct, conscious of their s.e.xual needs, and both diligent and imaginative at fulfilling them. Euphemisms like "throbbing manhood" are replaced by simpler, less ambiguous terms. have made her a star in the publis.h.i.+ng world. Think of her work as romance fiction in which the characters are black, anatomically correct, conscious of their s.e.xual needs, and both diligent and imaginative at fulfilling them. Euphemisms like "throbbing manhood" are replaced by simpler, less ambiguous terms.

I mention Zane not so much because of her books but because of her readers. Much has been written about the decline of the two-parent household among African Americans. The focus has been mostly on the Abandoned-young single mothers, babies having babies. But this trend is also a Mainstream phenomenon. Yale University researchers have found that highly educated black women are especially likely to be unmarried and independent, and that they are increasingly unlikely to find black husbands of comparable accomplishment-black women pursuing postgraduate studies outnumber black men by almost two to one. Potential husbands come in other colors, of course, but studies show that black women, at least to this point, have been much less open to the possibilities of interracial marriage than black men.

In other words, in places like Prince George's and DeKalb there is a substantial population of successful, independent black women who have never been married and never will be. Add them to the black women who are separated or divorced, and you've identified a large and growing segment of Mainstream black America. There is, so far, no truly a.n.a.logous group among whites or other minorities; numbers of female SALAs (single adults living alone) are increasing throughout society, but nowhere has the rise been nearly as rapid or as significant as among African Americans. According to the Census Bureau, 21 percent of adult white women have never been married. Among adult black women, the figure is a stunning 42 percent.2 These unattached women are giving a new twist to an old and disputed idea, which is that black America is essentially a matriarchy. The meta-narrative goes something like this: From the earliest days of slavery, black men were prized and of course exploited, but also feared and envied. In the imagination of white society, black men were imputed to have superhuman strength and s.e.xual prowess, which was threatening to white men at the most primal level. Black men were thus subjected to the most s.a.d.i.s.tic tortures. After emanc.i.p.ation, the black man still had to be kept down; when the uppity black fighter Jack Johnson-who had the audacity to date white women publicly-defeated the white former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries on July 4, 1910, in what had been billed as the "Fight of the Century," angry whites rioted in cities across the nation.

The black woman, though, was less of a threat. Given more s.p.a.ce in American society, she became the mainstay of the black family-she kept a steady job, she went to church, she supported her man when the world was too much for him to bear, she forgave him when he strayed, she provided stability and continuity, she raised the children, she subjugated her own needs to those of her man and her family. She was the rock, the anchor, the queen.

But what is an anchor without a s.h.i.+p? To me, this is one of the most interesting developments in the evolution of Mainstream black America: Millions of women are on their own, improvising their way through life. Just in my circle of friends, I know single black women who have decided to have children but not get married, adopt children on their own, or take in the children of relatives who, for whatever reason, are unable to care for them. I also know black women who don't want children but wouldn't mind a husband. I know black women who use their disposable income to travel constantly and in great style, with Paris being a popular destination; Josephine Baker was a powerful role model.

Almost every accomplished, Mainstream, single black woman I know is involved in some kind of volunteer project whose aim is to uplift the Abandoned-reading to schoolchildren, mentoring teenage girls, helping victims of domestic violence. Almost every one belongs to at least one book club. Almost all date black men, when a suitable black man presents himself, but almost none date white men. None seems "desperate to find a man," and most seem quite happy-with good jobs, high incomes, and no children or spouse to worry about, they tend to be financially savvy and secure. Most own their homes. Almost all the single black women of my acquaintance go to church regularly, but few see any contradiction between spending the morning in a pew singing hymns and the evening curled up with one of Zane's X-rated tomes.

The uncertain marriage prospects of educated, single black women are usually presented as some sort of tragedy, but that's not the impression I get. I see instead a fascinating process of self-invention, and I think I might be seeing American society's most radical experiment in rewriting the definitions of household, family, and fulfillment.

The truth is that I never fully bought the matriarchy idea. But I always thought that the women's movement was mostly old news to African American women. They were long accustomed to juggling family and career, well acquainted with the tradeoffs that modern life demands. Now, I believe, Mainstream black women may be blazing another trail that the rest of American society will follow as we redefine the concepts of household and family. In this sense, the black Mainstream is at the cutting edge of societal evolution.

It is hard to overstate how heroic the Mainstream's rise has been. Larger numbers of African Americans have made a greater advance, and done so more swiftly, than has been the case with any other significant "outsider" group that successfully pushed, charmed, or clawed its way into the American middle cla.s.s. Just as it's wrong to ignore the overlapping pathologies of poverty, hopelessness, unemployment, crime, incarceration, and family disintegration that plague black Americans disproportionately, it's also wrong to deny that the rise of the black Mainstream is truly a great American success story-arguably, the greatest of all.

To state the obvious, African American progress cannot be measured from the very beginning-the arrival of the first African slaves at Jamestown in 1619. (The Spanish had brought some Africans to Florida decades earlier, but that turned out to be a false start.) For more than half the elapsed time since, black progress was not just discouraged, not just hampered, but actually outlawed-in South Carolina, Georgia, and other Southern states, it was against the law to teach a slave to write. These restrictions against black literacy-in effect, laws to prevent black intellectual development, which was rightly considered dangerous-became more draconian, not less so, during slavery's final tumultuous decades. White Southerners had long lived in constant fear of black insurrection, and in 1831 the Nat Turner revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, turned that fear into something like sheer panic throughout the slave-owning states. In Mississippi, for example, legislators promptly pa.s.sed a new law requiring all free blacks to leave the state, lest they incite the slaves by educating them.

It is equally useless to take emanc.i.p.ation as a starting point. This is not just because of the enormous deficits that newly freed blacks faced. Without a.s.sets or education they had to start from scratch, but during Reconstruction they made rapid gains. The problem was that those gains were promptly and often brutally taken away by Southern officials when Reconstruction was abruptly halted. This betrayal was committed with the acquiescence of the federal government-which was more interested in reaching an accommodation with the South than in following through on General Sherman's promise of "forty acres and a mule"-and a stunningly racist Supreme Court. Jim Crow laws in the South deliberately kept the building blocks of meaningful development-education, opportunity, wealth that could be pa.s.sed down through the generations-out of African American hands. Black advancement simply wasn't allowed.

This situation, in which African Americans were deliberately and at times brutally held down, persisted through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. In 1945, black sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton published Black Metropolis Black Metropolis, a landmark study of the huge African American community in Chicago. Benefiting from extensive data collected during the Depression by WPA researchers, the book is perhaps the most comprehensive and vivid portrait ever a.s.sembled of separate but unequal black America. The authors devote one chapter to "The Job Ceiling"-the strictures that confined most blacks to semiskilled, unskilled, or "servant" jobs where the pay was low and the opportunity for advancement, for "betterment of the race," was close to nil. In 1940, according to Drake and Cayton, nearly 75 percent of employed black men in Chicago and more than 85 percent of employed black women worked in these low-paid categories as gardeners, housemaids, janitors-menial jobs, essentially, that entailed providing services to whites.3 For black men, even those with a better-than-average education, there was security rather than shame in working as a Pullman porter or a Red Cap luggage handler-two occupations so dominated by African Americans that they were known in the community as "Negro jobs." Chicago was by far the nation's busiest and most vital railway hub, and trains were vastly more important as a means of long-distance travel than they are today. In 1930, of the approximately nine thousand Pullman porters in the nation, about four thousand lived in Chicago and the great majority were black. Some in the African American community saw this hegemony in railroad service jobs as unfortunate. "We do not believe we should have a monopoly on Pullman porter service any more than that white people should have a monopoly on Pullman conductor service, or that Irishmen should have a monopoly on police and fire departments," the Chicago Defender Chicago Defender, a leading black weekly, editorialized. But the pay was better than blacks could dream of in most other jobs, especially after the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, under the leaders.h.i.+p of the legendary A. Philip Randolph, negotiated a contract that gave porters a "living wage." The additional cash that porters earned in tips elevated the job from tolerable to desirable.

Of the estimated six hundred Red Cap baggage handlers in Chicago, four hundred were African American. The black Red Caps were, generally, much better educated than their white colleagues; one union official reported that of the ninety African Americans in his local, seventy-two had at least some college and two were practicing physicians, according to Drake and Cayton.4 For white men, hauling valises, suitcases, hatboxes, and steamer trunks through train stations was a low-status job. For black men, it was simply a job that offered mediocre pay but good tips, and thus could support a family. Status wasn't the point. For white men, hauling valises, suitcases, hatboxes, and steamer trunks through train stations was a low-status job. For black men, it was simply a job that offered mediocre pay but good tips, and thus could support a family. Status wasn't the point.

For black women, the default job was domestic service. The pay was low-during the Depression, the going rates were $2 a day for occasional work, $20 a week for steady employment-and conditions varied widely. Employers could be capricious, unreasonable, or abusive; their homes and habits could be filthy. Those were the "hard people to work for." Or a black domestic worker could be lucky enough to be employed by families that were consistent, thoughtful, and generous-"nice people to work for." The families of women who worked for the "nice" folks could benefit from the employers' largess toward loyal retainers, which sometimes, though not usually, could be genuinely large; Mrs. Lucille Foster of Was.h.i.+ngton, for example, was given a new car every few years and ultimately even a house by the wealthy Georgetown family for whom she worked for decades, and the family went so far as to establish a trust to care for her in her old age. But this kind of generosity was rare. The more common and significant benefit that domestic workers received was the socialization that resulted from close daily contact with people who lived on a different plane of existence. They learned the white world with an intimacy that could only come from literally examining people's dirty laundry. This knowledge helped the workers and their families survive.

But these urban, sophisticated black men and women were stuck at the bottom of the income scale-and this was true even in Chicago, the boomtown with the big shoulders. Back in the South, millions of African Americans who hadn't joined the Great Migration were still tied to the land, not as slaves but as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, or hired labor. Official policy in the South was to keep blacks uneducated and dependent on white landowners for employment or subsistence. It is not possible to rise when you have a boot on your neck.

Progress has to be measured, then, roughly from the middle of the twentieth century, which is when the economic and social ambitions of African Americans began to change as new possibilities emerged. The first big impetus was World War II. The rapid mobilization of what was to become the world's biggest military-industrial complex provided instant employment, both voluntary and involuntary, for large numbers of African Americans, many of whom had been out of a job. In 1940, as war raged in Europe and U.S. industry geared up, A. Philip Randolph threatened a march on Was.h.i.+ngton to demand that African Americans be given some of the new jobs being created. President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded by creating a new federal committee to investigate and eliminate workplace discrimination. In the end, it didn't matter that Roosevelt's Fair Employment Practices Committee had no real power, thanks to the intervention of powerful Southern congressmen. There was simply no way to meet the wartime industrial demand without African American workers, who ended up with high-paying jobs they couldn't have dreamed of a few years earlier.

Once the United States entered the war, eligible black men volunteered or were drafted to serve in the military. Those who served in the segregated armed forces during the war years returned to civilian life with new skills, a new appreciation for their own potential, and a new att.i.tude of ent.i.tlement and impatience. The old separate but unequal devil's bargain, which many blacks had long accepted-and which they had found ways to rationalize, since there appeared to be no way to change it-was no longer tolerable.

Those stirrings of militancy helped produce the second big push: the civil rights movement. That great, tumultuous struggle culminated in 1964 and 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson secured pa.s.sage of the landmark Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. Even then, however, black Americans had to struggle to force the nation to begin to fulfill the promises it had made more than a century earlier.

It's only possible to measure black progress from roughly forty years ago, when opportunity became more than a rumor. And if you look at aggregate indices, you could argue that African Americans haven't come very far at all. In 2005, according to the Census Bureau, the median household income was $50,784 for non-Hispanic whites and $30,858 for blacks. That ratio-with black households earning about three-fifths of what white households earn-is about the same as it was in 1967, when the median household income was $36,895 for whites and $21,422 for blacks (in constant dollars).5 To put it mildly, that's discouraging. It looks at first glance as if forty years of antidiscrimination laws, affirmative action programs, and relentless consciousness-raising have made African Americans wealthier as the whole society became wealthier-but that in relative terms, all this has gotten us precisely nowhere. To put it mildly, that's discouraging. It looks at first glance as if forty years of antidiscrimination laws, affirmative action programs, and relentless consciousness-raising have made African Americans wealthier as the whole society became wealthier-but that in relative terms, all this has gotten us precisely nowhere.

Look more closely, however, and the numbers tell two stories-one about the surging advance of the Mainstream, the other about the bitter retreat of the Abandoned.

In 1967, just 25.8 percent of black households had a median income of more than $35,000 in today's dollars; by 2005, however, 45.3 percent of black households had crossed that threshold. In those four decades, the percentage of black households earning more than $75,000 went from 3.4 to 15.7.6 To be sure, much higher percentages of white households are affluent. But in terms of actual numbers, that meant roughly six million African Americans had become wealthy enough to live in s.p.a.cious homes, buy luxury goods, travel abroad on vacation, spoil their children-to live, in other words, just like well-to-do white folks. To be sure, much higher percentages of white households are affluent. But in terms of actual numbers, that meant roughly six million African Americans had become wealthy enough to live in s.p.a.cious homes, buy luxury goods, travel abroad on vacation, spoil their children-to live, in other words, just like well-to-do white folks.

Those income figures are more impressive when you take geography into account. The Great Migration notwithstanding, a majority of African Americans have always lived in the South-where the cost of living is well below the national average. In recent years, a trend of reverse migration has seen increasing numbers of blacks moving south, not just to metropolitan centers like Atlanta or Charlotte but to smaller cities and towns as well. In Manhattan, living on $75,000 a year sounds like bare subsistence. In Jackson, Mississippi; Dothan, Alabama; or Kingstree, South Carolina, it sounds like a ticket to the promised land.

In education, given the centuries-long policy of keeping black people ignorant and unlettered, African American gains have been even greater. In 1967, 53.4 percent of whites but only 29.5 percent of blacks had completed high school, according to the Census Bureau. In 2008, the figures were 87.1 percent for whites and 83 percent for blacks-for all intents and purposes, full parity. In 1967, 10.6 percent of whites and only 4 percent of blacks had completed four years of college. In 2008, 29.8 percent of whites and 19.6 percent of blacks were college-educated-a threefold increase for whites but a quintupling for African Americans.7 The oft-quoted "statistic" about there being more young black men in prison than in college-Barack Obama cited it during the presidential campaign-is wrong by miles; there are about three times as many college-age African American men on campus as there are behind bars. It's true that one big hurdle remains: While the percentage of African Americans entering college is approaching that of whites, significantly fewer black students stay long enough to graduate. But leaving college short of a degree is hardly the same as being sent to prison. The oft-quoted "statistic" about there being more young black men in prison than in college-Barack Obama cited it during the presidential campaign-is wrong by miles; there are about three times as many college-age African American men on campus as there are behind bars. It's true that one big hurdle remains: While the percentage of African Americans entering college is approaching that of whites, significantly fewer black students stay long enough to graduate. But leaving college short of a degree is hardly the same as being sent to prison.

Roughly half of black families own their homes. More than one-fourth of African American adults work in management or professional jobs. Before the 2008 financial meltdown, African Americans had an aggregate purchasing power estimated at $913 billion.8 If Mainstream black America were a sovereign nation, it would have the seventeenth-largest economy in the world-bigger than that of Turkey, for example, or Saudi Arabia, or South Africa. That all this has happened in the s.p.a.ce of forty years, due to the ambition and labor of just two generations, is something of which Horatio Alger would be proud. If Mainstream black America were a sovereign nation, it would have the seventeenth-largest economy in the world-bigger than that of Turkey, for example, or Saudi Arabia, or South Africa. That all this has happened in the s.p.a.ce of forty years, due to the ambition and labor of just two generations, is something of which Horatio Alger would be proud.

Why hasn't this Mainstream success penetrated the national consciousness? Mostly because we tend to see what we expect to see. Our eyes confirm what we "know," and everybody "knows" that black America is mired in intractable problems that defy solution. Everybody "knows" that black America, on average, has hardly begun to catch up with the rest of society-and since we "know" this, there is no reason to look more closely. If people would actually open their eyes, the existence of an enormous black Mainstream would be obvious. In terms of population and income, it's almost like failing to notice the existence of Australia.

It's hard to believe that half a century after Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man Invisible Man was published we'd still be talking about invisibility. But we are. Remember the conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly's famous dinner in September 2007 with the Reverend Al Sharpton at Sylvia's, the upscale soul-food restaurant in Harlem? Afterward, O'Reilly shared his amazement-there's no other word to describe it-with his radio audience. He marveled that "all the people up there are tremendously respectful." He gushed, "I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patrons.h.i.+p." was published we'd still be talking about invisibility. But we are. Remember the conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly's famous dinner in September 2007 with the Reverend Al Sharpton at Sylvia's, the upscale soul-food restaurant in Harlem? Afterward, O'Reilly shared his amazement-there's no other word to describe it-with his radio audience. He marveled that "all the people up there are tremendously respectful." He gushed, "I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patrons.h.i.+p."

One wondered how, in O'Reilly's imagination, a black-owned restaurant in a black-majority neighborhood might deviate from the standard restaurant template. He explained: "There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea.' You know, I mean, everybody was-it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all."

He didn't stop there: "I think black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves. They're getting away from the Sharptons and the [Reverend Jesse] Jacksons and the people trying to lead them into a race-based culture. They're just trying to figure it out. 'Look, I can make it. If I work hard and get educated, I can make it.'"9 Commentators, including me, had great fun at O'Reilly's expense. The remarks were outrageous, insulting, clueless, racist-all you had to do was pick a few loaded adjectives and fire away. There was another way to look at it, though. O'Reilly may be a bag of wind, but he's an intelligent bag of wind. He's not a Rush Limbaugh or a Glenn Beck or a Sean Hannity-not an entertainer who manipulates anger for ratings and wouldn't know how to engage with the issues in any serious way. I think O'Reilly is wrong about most everything, but I'm confident that if I visited his house I'd find actual shelves of actual books that he had actually read.

That such a man would be so utterly ignorant of the existence of the black Mainstream-not in Atlanta or Chicago, not somewhere deep in flyover country, but in the most famous black neighborhood in the nation, just blocks uptown from his studio-is astonis.h.i.+ng. It's not just that he wouldn't have thought of venturing into a black Mainstream context without an escort. It's that, apparently, he had no idea that such a thing as the black Mainstream even existed.

If O'Reilly or anyone else wanted to meet the black Mainstream in a setting where outsiders rarely venture, I'd suggest going to homecoming weekend on a historically black college campus. The last time a visit to see my family happened to coincide with South Carolina State University's homecoming, I went to the game. When someone asked me about it later, I was able to report that the contest had been a squeaker, with the home team winning after several lead changes and momentum s.h.i.+fts. But for the life of me I couldn't recall who the opponent was. And I hadn't been drinking.

A friend of mine who lives in Was.h.i.+ngton-an SCSU graduate who retired not long ago after running a successful engineering consulting firm for many years-drives down to homecoming every year without fail, and never sets foot inside the stadium. He never even bothers to buy a ticket. If you were to conduct a survey asking what the point of SCSU's homecoming is, watching football would score pretty low. Watching halftime would score higher. The normal pattern is reversed: The stands actually fill fill when the second quarter ends, only to thin out again when the third quarter begins. n.o.body wants to miss the spectacle. when the second quarter ends, only to thin out again when the third quarter begins. n.o.body wants to miss the spectacle.

The year I went, there was a controversy about the other team's cheerleaders, who were not just scantily and suggestively clad but whose routine included a lot of b.u.mping, grinding, pelvis-thrusting, and booty-bouncing. "They look like a bunch of hoochie mamas," was the consensus of the women sitting in my row; the men wisely kept their opinions to themselves. SCSU's cheerleaders were only marginally more demure, however, and their performance only slightly less s.e.xual. The advent of dance-troupe cheerleading squads that look as if they've escaped from a hip-hop music video is a hotly debated innovation in black-college football, but everybody's doing it.

Halftime's main event was the traditional battle of the marching bands. The visitors, who were from Norfolk State University in Virginia-I looked it up-performed first, and they were good. Surprisingly good. No one ever goes to a football game between historically black colleges expecting to hear a bad marching band, but Norfolk State momentarily stunned the crowd. SCSU has one of the nation's elite bands. The Marching 101 are expected to blow the compet.i.tion away, not barely win the musical showdown. But that's what happened: a narrow victory, owing to more sophisticated ch.o.r.eography, tighter formations, and richer sound.

After halftime, people started drifting away to where the real action was. Sprawled across an area large enough to accommodate several football fields that cool, rainy Sat.u.r.day afternoon was a soggy but high-spirited encampment. There were huge, Winnebago-style RVs, most with awnings that unfurled from the sides or the rear to provide shelter. There were pickup trucks with trailers on which were mounted barbecue grills large enough to cook a whole pig. There were hundreds and hundreds of cars, of course-SUVs, mostly, but also luxury cars, politically correct hybrids, the occasional vintage Mustang or Corvette. Everywhere there were party tents, some emblazoned with Greek letters signifying a fraternity or sorority. Vendors had set up tables to sell T-s.h.i.+rts, hats, and various tchotchkes. This was 2008, just a few weeks before the presidential election, and merchandise with the SCSU logo was running a poor second to anything labeled Obama.

Oh, and the people: thousands of men and women who belong to the black Mainstream, an unseen majority.

The invisibility of the black middle cla.s.s is by now a standard trope of modern media criticism, but the phenomenon persists. Black dysfunction has always been newsworthy. Black achievement gets reported because those stories make everyone feel better, score points with black readers or viewers, and partly compensate for all the coverage of black dysfunction. Black normalcy is no more surprising, shocking, or heartwarming than any other color of normalcy, so it's really no surprise that it doesn't make the front page. But Mainstream black Americans seldom make the inside pages, either-the feature stories, for example, that are about neighborhood disputes over speed b.u.mps, as opposed to neighborhood disputes about drug gangs.

There are black college professors who spend their professional lives studying international relations, but they aren't the experts that newspaper reporters and television producers keep on speed dial to offer wisdom about the latest crisis in Honduras or East Timor. There are black scuba clubs that jet off to explore the coast of Belize or the Great Barrier Reef, but their members aren't featured in stories about the impact of climate change on sensitive coral populations. There are African American motorcycle clubs that occasionally get written about, but only in a look-at-this, man-bites-dog sort of way; the president of Atlanta's biggest organized group of black Harley-Davidson riders would be quoted in a story whose point was how interesting it is that such a club exists but almost surely wouldn't be called for comment about a new mandatory helmet law.

In part, this is because society finds it so difficult to see the black experience as universal. For that matter, society has a hard time seeing anything other than what is considered the majority experience as universal. It caused not a ripple when Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, in his Senate confirmation hearings, spoke of how his heritage as a descendant of Italian immigrants had a positive impact on the way he approached cases as an appellate judge. "Old country" roots, family pa.s.sage through Ellis Island, hard-won a.s.similation, a sense of ethnic solidarity-that story, specific to only a minority of citizens, is seen as a quintessentially American narrative. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her confirmation hearings, was scolded, excoriated, and accused of un-American bias over a years-old speech in which she mused about how her heritage as a "wise Latina" might make her a better judge. The Nuyorican narrative is one that the nation seems to have more trouble accepting as legitimately American, for some reason. Imagine the uproar that would have ensued if Barack Obama, during the campaign, had claimed that his African American heritage would make him a better president. Remember the uproar that did did ensue when videotapes surfaced of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in flowing robes and full rhetorical flight, presenting an Afrocentric narrative of the country he had served honorably as a U.S. Marine. ensue when videotapes surfaced of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in flowing robes and full rhetorical flight, presenting an Afrocentric narrative of the country he had served honorably as a U.S. Marine.

This societal chauvinism is absurd, frustrating, at times even infuriating. I've appeared dozens of times on television with the conservative commentator Pat Buchanan and managed to keep my cool, but the one time I lost it-my eyes got round and crazy, friends say, and apparently I looked as if I were about to smack him-was when he adamantly, even aggressively refused to acknowledge my point that Sotomayor's personal history was every bit as American as his own. He's an intelligent man who reads books and knows history, but he could not bring himself to admit that a Puerto Rican girl's childhood in the Bronx was just as red, white, and blue as an Irish American boy's childhood in Was.h.i.+ngton. What made me berserk was that Buchanan wasn't just taking an extreme position for the sake of debate. He genuinely didn't get it.

The notion that there's something privileged and somehow sacred about the many variations of the Euro-Caucasian experience in America is destined to fade away. By 2045 or perhaps earlier, depending on which projection you believe, there will be no racial or ethnic majority in the United States.10 We will be a huge and varied collection of minorities. This is already the case in our most populous states, California and Texas, and soon may be true in New York as well. White is right as a fundamental a.s.sumption, with or without racist intent, cannot possibly be long for this nation-or for this world, if you consider reasonable projections about the rise of China, India, Brazil, and other fast-developing nations that are not European or Anglo-American. But chauvinism is only one reason why the black middle-cla.s.s experience is so seldom recognized as universal. We will be a huge and varied collection of minorities. This is already the case in our most populous states, California and Texas, and soon may be true in New York as well. White is right as a fundamental a.s.sumption, with or without racist intent, cannot possibly be long for this nation-or for this world, if you consider reasonable projections about the rise of China, India, Brazil, and other fast-developing nations that are not European or Anglo-American. But chauvinism is only one reason why the black middle-cla.s.s experience is so seldom recognized as universal.

The other is the "two worlds" reality-the fact that we tend to keep so much of the black Mainstream experience to ourselves.

At the SCSU homecoming, a man who was selling Obama paraphernalia recognized me from my television appearances and called me over. He offered to give me a T-s.h.i.+rt, my choice of color. "I might give you two if you're a Q," he said.

"I didn't pledge," I told him, "but my father's an Alpha."

"Well, then, I don't know about this whole thing," he said playfully. "I always liked what you had to say when you were up there with Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, but I might have to do a reevaluation."

Translation: By asking about my being a Q, he was inquiring whether I was a member of the African American fraternity Omega Psi Phi. The Greek letter omega looks a bit like a capital Q that someone neglected to close at the bottom. Members often have the letter branded on one shoulder-literally burned into the skin with a branding iron, leaving a raised omega-shaped scar. Omega Psi Phi is one of the two most prominent black fraternities; the other is Alpha Phi Alpha, to which my late father belonged. Wherever you find a critical ma.s.s of college-educated black men, and I mean wherever wherever, you'll find some Qs and some Alphas-and they'll be engaged in friendly, trash-talking rivalry. If your father was a Q, and you decide to pledge, then you naturally become a Q as well. The fraternity system is stronger on historically black campuses, but it's alive and well at white-majority schools as well. Alpha Phi Alpha was founded in 1906 at Cornell, and my father pledged while he was at the University of Michigan. If I hadn't arrived in Ann Arbor in 1970-a moment when the whole Greek thing seemed hopelessly out of touch with the social, cultural, and political revolution that was taking place-I'd surely have become an Alpha, too.

Similarly, sororities are an important lifelong affiliation for many college-educated black women. My mother is a member of Delta Sigma Theta, and naturally my sister, Ellen, when she arrived at Spelman College and decided to pledge, became a Delta, too. The trash-talking between Delta Sigma Theta and Alpha Kappa Alpha-which, truth be told, is the oldest black sorority, predating the Deltas by three years-is more demure than what you hear among the guys, but the rivalry is there just the same. Deltas have a thing about the color red. Whenever you're at an event with a lot of middle-cla.s.s black women and you notice a statistically significant overabundance of red dresses, you're almost surely among a bunch of Deltas.

Aretha Franklin and Nikki Giovanni are Deltas. Dionne Warwick belongs to another sorority, Zeta Phi Beta. Toni Morrison is an Alpha Kappa Alpha, as was Marian Anderson. Martin Luther King Jr. and W. E. B. DuBois were Alphas. Bill Cosby, Vernon Jordan, and Michael Jordan are Qs, as were Langston Hughes and Roy Wilkins. These are lifelong affiliations, and while some men and women take them more seriously than others, few who have pledged a black fraternity or sorority take the commitment lightly. When African Americans speak of someone as "my fraternity brother" or "my sorority sister," a connection and even an obligation are implied.

There is nothing secretive or sinister, nothing skull-and-bones-ish about any of these organizations. They were established, beginning about a hundred years ago, to provide mutual support and encouragement among blacks who knew that when they graduated from college they would be taking their hard-won learning into a cruel, openly racist world. Obviously the world today is a different place. But the black fraternities and sororities have endured-and they have remained black.

There's one more African American fraternity I should mention. It isn't a campus affiliation but instead can only be joined-invitation only-by grown men: Sigma Pi Phi, known colloquially as the Boule, from an archaic Greek word meaning "representative a.s.sembly." The Boule (p.r.o.nounced boo-lay) is for high-achieving black professionals, and its reach is nationwide. Once in Sacramento, which few would think of as a magnet for African Americans, my wife, Avis, and I were invited as guests to a Boule Sunday-afternoon get-together. The venue was the expansive, Spanish-colonial style home of a prominent young developer who was serving a term as head of the local Boule chapter. Present were college professors, former campus radicals, doctors, lawyers, financiers, and the like, along with their equally accomplished spouses. The only items on the agenda were food and fellows.h.i.+p. There was talk about the recession and its impact on the California real estate market. There was a certain amount of networking, I suppose, although these were men and women who had known one another long enough to have already made all the possible connections. The real point of the gathering was to gather-to laugh, commiserate, solve the problems of the world, debate the prospects of the Sacramento Kings, and agree on tee times for the coming week. There was something warm and almost womb-like about the afternoon-easy comfort in a house full of total strangers. There was so much we knew about one another's lives without even having to ask.

Everyone present was black. This slice of Mainstream black life-like so much of the cake-is for us. Not for anybody else.

Also, it may not be for long.

The us-against-the-world solidarity of Mainstream black culture is dissipating. On balance, it's hard to argue that this is a bad thing. In fact, it's hard to argue that it's not tremendously encouraging, given our nation's history with race. If there's no longer a bunker mentality, that must mean that those once in the bunker no longer feel themselves under attack. What's happening is a.s.similation, which is an odd term to use about a group whose first members landed before the Mayflower Mayflower. It seems wrong to speak of a.s.similating into a society we literally helped build, counterintuitive to think of learning a culture to which we so lavishly contributed. But that's where the black Mainstream is headed-not this generation, perhaps, but surely the next.

My generation, like those that came before, was forged in an all-black context amid a hostile society. I went to all-black schools until integration, at which point I became a member of an embattled black clique. In higher education, the nation was reaching a tipping point: Before, most African Americans had attended historically black colleges and universities, but I graduated high school at a moment when white-majority inst.i.tutions were actively seeking to attract black students. Today, only about 20 percent of black college students are attending historically black colleges and universities11-a complete reversal within just a few decades.

My wife and I grew up in black neighborhoods; one result of integration is that our sons did not. Most of the friends they had while growing up were white. But times had changed, and what we once thought of as "proprietary" black culture had spread beyond any narrow racial context. Black became not just acceptable but cool. Both of my sons have had white friends who spoke Ebonics much more fluently than they did. Likewise, young African Americans are acculturated and can easily converse in today's dialects of Valleyspeak. In black-majority Mainstream community like Prince George's or DeKalb, it is not impossible for white kids to be cool and popular. And it is likely that black students, even if they grow up in mostly black or all-black neighborhoods, will eventually find themselves on white-majority college campuses. The lifelong friends they meet in the dorms will be white, Asian, Latino-the law of averages says they're unlikely to be black. When these Mainstream kids go out with their friends to hear music, it will be in integrated venues-not an all-black nightclub like the Bohemian Caverns of old. My generation had many of these world-expanding college experiences, too. But we had lived through the civil rights movement, the a.s.sa.s.sination of Dr. King, the riots, the emergence of the Black Panthers...We had the kind of race consciousness that comes from experience, not a history book.

All of which is a long way of saying that race doesn't matter to our children's generation in the same way it does to ours. It matters less. Change is good. But even welcome, long-awaited changes aren't easy.

For example, teenage angst and rebellion are innovations that Mainstream black America has found hard to accept. When there was a single black America, one of its cultural characteristics was respect for elders. It's not that teenagers or young adults always obeyed their parents-far from it-or that they didn't argue. But most of the insubordination was surrept.i.tious. You did not sa.s.s your parents to their faces, no matter how unreasonable the command or how unjust the punishment you were being forced to endure. Once out of the house, of course, you did what you pleased. But you didn't provoke a confrontation. And if a direct confrontation did take place, you knew that even if you were absolutely right on the merits, you were still in the wrong for having forced the issue instead of finding some other way of making your point. You also did not sulk, mope, or whine like the sulky, mopey, whiny white teenagers you saw on television. From what we could tell, it seemed as if black juvenile delinquents were more respectful to their parents than white honor students were to theirs.

Now, Mainstream parents are often confronted with the kind of sa.s.sing, sulking, whining, and moping that their own parents never would have tolerated. Perhaps this is an inevitable step in the a.s.similation process, a.n.a.logous to young Indian Americans who refuse to go along with arranged marriages, or young Korean Americans who balk at joining the family business. It is a less profound form of rebellion than those other examples. But it frustrates parents and sometimes strains family bonds in a way that many African Americans find alien and distressing.

Another adjustment for Mainstream parents is that the girlfriends and boyfriends their children bring home from high school or college may not be African American. This sets up a conflict between two strongly held Mainstream values-on one side an absolute belief in Dr. King's dream that all be judged solely by the content of their character, on the other a fierce determination that African American history and culture be not only revered but also perpetuated.

Mainstream black America, then, seems in many ways a paradoxical place. We demanded and won the right to live wherever we want, but many of us decide to live together in clumps. We complain, with justification, that the nation seems not to know or acknowledge that middle-cla.s.s black Americans even exist, but we conduct much of middle-cla.s.s black American life out of the larger society's field of vision. We marched, studied, and worked our way to the point where we are a.s.similating, but we have reservations about a.s.similation if it means giving up our separate ident.i.ty.

For the Mainstream, race shouldn't matter. But it does.

5

THE ABANDONED: NO WAY OUT.

I've seen the Reverend Jesse Jackson rendered speechless exactly twice. The second time was the night Barack Obama was elected president, and Jackson stood among the mult.i.tudes in Chicago's Grant Park, silent tears of joy streaming down his face.

The first time was three years earlier, in drowned, desperate New Orleans.